Technological Backwardness and Colonial Ambitions

The agreement, moreover, provided the state with much-needed funds and technical expertise. By the second decade of the twentieth century, it appeared to Iranian statesmen, such as Vosuq al-Dowleh, that with the collapse of imperial Russia, Iran’s role as a buffer state had come to an end and that its sovereignty and territorial integrity could be guaranteed only through the backing of British Empire, the winner of the war and the new master of the Middle East. In an exchange of letters between Cox and Vosuq al-Dowleh, Britain reassured Iran of its support for war reparations in the Paris Peace Conference and favorable renegotiation of all Anglo-Persian treaties.

Yet behind the seemingly benign terms of the agreement, most Iranians detected the ghost of British hegemony. If any proof was needed, it was furnished, after the collapse of Vosuq al-Dowleh’s government in June 1920, in large monetary gifts paid by Cox to the premier and two of his chief ministers to lubricate the ratification of the agreement. The rumorridden political circles of Tehran opposed the agreement, and the nationalist press, with few exceptions, portrayed it as compromising Iran’s sovereignty. In this regard, the efforts of Vosuq al-Dowleh to present the agreement as the best Iran could afford under the circumstances did not succeed. A capable and cultured statesman of great erudition, who once served as the speaker of the first Majles, Vosuq hoped to leverage the agreement to bring political stability and economic reform.

Vosuq al-Dowleh, and his energetic foreign minister Firuz Mirza Nosrat al-Dowleh, were unfairly labeled in nationalist circles as traitors to the Iranian cause. Almost unanimous opposition to the agreement—which had yet to be ratified by the then suspended Majles—expressed by the burgeoning, though often naively sentimental, press. After a decade of national struggle, compliance with the spirit of the 1919 agreement discredited the Qajar nobility and its associated bureaucratic elite in the eyes of the urban intelligentsia.

Iranian public opinion was further buoyed by international condemnation of the British desire to unceremoniously devour Iran as yet another client state. The Woodrow Wilson administration in particular was incensed by the disingenuous methods the British employed in the Paris Peace Conference to keep Iran from presenting its grievances, even though it is quite possible that earlier the United States had condoned the agreement. In contrast to the Egyptian Wafd Party, whose presence at the conference highlighted the Egyptian nationalist struggle for independence, the Iranian delegation was barred from even bringing to the table its demands for mere recognition, let alone compensation, of the foreign occupation and economic and human losses that Iran had sustained during the war.

The British delegation, overruling the Americans, argued that the Iranian case could not be heard in the conference since Iran was not a party to the war and thus did not have a place in the postwar settlement. Informally, Curzon assured the American and French delegations that Britain respected Iran’s sovereignty and would help rectify its grievances. With the prospects of Britain as the mandatory power in Palestine and Iraq, the implementation of both to be presided over by Percy Cox, such assurances about Iran appeared highly suspicious. The 1919 agreement was thus seen by Wilson administration as a backdoor method to greater British colonial expansion. The French had their own ax to grind. They were evidently unhappy with the 1919 agreement because the implementation of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement had left Palestine out of the French Syrian mandate and under British control.

The ANGLO-PERSIAN Agreement